The Singles Jukebox

Rounding out our 2024 catch-up is this #1 hit that is now our #1 hit (so far)…

[Video]
[8.30]

Melody Esme: Obviously, “Not Like Us” was Kendrick’s song of 2024 (and, consensus-wise, maybe the song of the year, full-stop, though it’ll have to fight “Good Luck, Babe!” for the title). But with its brilliant sample of the fourth greatest freestyle song ever, the “I feel good, get the fuck out my f-a-a-ace” hook, and no cultural context needed to get it beyond hip-hop’s history of braggadocious jams, “Squabble Up” may prove more enduring down the road. His most immediate, purely catchy single since “King Kunta.”
[9]

Katherine St. Asaph: At first I thought the “When I Hear Music” sample was gimmicky J. R. Rotem shit and a weird attention grab by Kendrick Lamar — who, after “Not Like Us,” has earned more automatic attention than many artists ever do. But it’s cool how Sounwave and Jack Antonoff (still unfairly maligned, do not @ me) completely transmute its genre and timbre. Feels like Kendrick’s coasting, but people said that about “Not Like Us” too. 
[8]

Ian Mathers: Do you think Kendrick is going to start getting people yelling “Not Like Us” at his shows, “Free Bird” style? Do you think if he does, they’ll get their asses beat?
[9]

Julian Axelrod: An incomplete list of words and phrases from this song that I will eternally hear in Kendrick’s nasally tone: broccoli, hydrated, deluxe, bunk skunk, thunk thunk thunk, and of course, “squabble up,” ten beautifully arranged letters that should replace the Hollywood sign. On an album where Kendrick pays extensive tribute (stylistically, if not explicitly) to the late, great Drakeo the Ruler, this song best captures his predecessor’s gift for saying words you’ve never heard in a way you’ll never forget. After a decade of touting himself as the voice of a generation, it’s fun to hear Kendrick test the limits of his generational voice.
[8]

Taylor Alatorre: He probably should run for mayor when he’s done, to be honest, because “Squabble Up” is a masterclass in political pivoting. For those who still haven’t gotten all the Drake slander out of their system, there’s enough thickly veiled shade here to satisfy, and the instant “victory lap” consensus is not an incorrect one. But to the extent that the disses exist, they’re knotted in such Gordian forms that, even when untangled, a plausible deniability is maintained: is this really anti-Aubrey sentiment, or just your everyday hater-stomping? The floor-filling sample seems to nudge toward the latter, and the type of close listening that’s most being rewarded here isn’t the lyrical kind; it’s the kind that takes pleasure in tracing out the sonic signature of a charmed cultural moment, specifically the year when Lil Jon became E-40’s main producer. The hype train must be kept a-rollin’, and to that end, Mr. Morale must be politely shoved aside, with “Mr. Get Off” allowed to take his place. Kendrick is wise to juggle the competing expectations of a bifurcated audience, and even more so to realize that the most transferrable element of “Not Like Us” is its aural pantomiming of street justice. Try as you might, there is no rebuttal to thunk thunk thunk thunk thunk.
[8]

Aaron Bergstrom: Sometimes an irritant just becomes a part of your environment. Maybe it’s a persistent noise or an unpleasant smell. You live with it every day. You get used to it to the point where it doesn’t even register anymore. Then, one day, it’s gone. You feel an incredible lightness, like a weight has been lifted from your subconscious. You’re free. How did you ever live like that for so long? Anyway, that’s what it feels like to finally hear a Kendrick Lamar song that isn’t about Drake. 
[9]

Leah Isobel: Feels like a loaded time to say that I’m not really a Kendrick girlie, but here we are. I don’t dislike him — he’s quite talented! — but I tend to prefer artists with more cartoonish and unpredictable personae. (I remain, after all these years, an Azealia Banks stan. Do not fucking @ me.) Conversely, even Kendrick’s most fantastical material tends to orbit around relatively predictable markers of seriousness and skill. Like here, for instance. I love his drunk-singalong delivery of the hook, I love that “thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk-thunk” bit, and I love the Debbie Deb sample. But the production is too mannered and clean, too obvious in its references, and while Kendrick’s deployment of different vocal levels and styles is impressive, it also feels a little bit more like a highlight reel than a choice made with this specific song in mind. I imagine there are more eyes and ears on him now than in years past, more listeners and fans expecting him to further delineate the contrast between the serious hip-hop that his image has come to epitomize and the unserious, morally bankrupt, culture-vulture pop shit that The Other Guy made his name on. It might not appeal to my tastes, but I don’t blame Kendrick for complying.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: I’ve always thought Kendrick was, counter to popular conception, a better singles artist than album artist (case in point: the thrill of “The Heart Pt. 5” vs the tedium of Mr. Morale). On GNX, he splits the difference — it’s an album that sheds the rich conceptual heft of his prior records for a slightly elevated take on untitled unmastered., a wiry collection of endlessly compelling sketches and hooks. “Squabble Up” is not my favorite song from that album (I prefer the gloriously bassy “Dodger Blue,” and not just for its half-decade-on Roddy Ricch revivalism), but it’s a perfect illustration of why GNX works; it’s a dense, insular song, flooding the zone with catchy fragments and vocal tics. Over a canvas of ’80s electro nostalgia, Lamar sounds almost smug in his victory lap boasts; it’d be frustratingly egotistic if he wasn’t such a compelling impressionist; leaving aside his skills as a lyricist, he can mine a wealth of feeling just out of saying “squabble up” in different intonations.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: Kendrick caught in that strobe-lit hallway, rapping about being reincarnated over hyperventilation desperate enough to be the aspiration of predator as to be prey. When “Squabble Up” appeared in full form on GNX, four-and-a-half months after it was teased in the “Not Like Us” video, it transformed from claustrophobic heater to something expansive enough to reach deeper into history than it does into physical space. The Debbie Deb sample leavens the beat — freestyle’s sweetness can’t help but do that — but Sounwave’s production (with, intriguingly, an assist from Jack Antonoff) draws on Los Angeles’s ancient connection to the electro sound: Egyptian Lover and the World Class Wreckin’ Cru live on in Lamar’s 2024. It’s Kendrick’s ideology in musical form, and the case he pressed against bête noire Drake for the entirety of last year: that hip-hop is cultural expression constructed from granular specifics. It’s built from specific places, specific histories, specific communities, and their specific histories and shared historiographies. Tell me why you rap if it’s fictional, he asks, and that might be an attempt to out-real the competition, but it’s also a demand not to allow this music to become deracinated and dislocated. He draws from hyphy here too — the “I’m finna go dumb” call-and-response in the bridge — and that’s a favorite creative font for Drake too; Kendrick, maybe, is underlining that as a Californian he shares this Bay Area heritage in a way his adversary doesn’t; that Oakland show won’t be Kendrick’s last stop. “Squabble” is a great word, petty and picayune, but expressed in a rush of sibilants and plosives. These are sounds for Kendrick to grasp and play with, and he extends that craft through his verses. “Yee-haw, we outside,” he drawls in sardonic character. “Get the fuck out my face,” as the hook possesses a rude vibrato. “Broadie,” “broccoli,” “couldn’t try me in the tri-state” are run out too. But “Squabble Up” isn’t just a freestyler showing off; the verbiage is there for the same reason the expansive production is. Kendrick wants rap to say something, but he knows that how it says it matters just as much.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Bless this man. He made this, this, and this. Maybe Kendrick Lamar / Matana Roberts / Scott Bridgeway collab album? (Stop clowning him for his bonnet, Kendrick. His hair looks better than yours.)
[10]

no blergs » Sunday, January 19th, 2025 7:41 pm

And our last reader pick from Juan Carlos: smoky indie with an unfortunately timely title (for real, though, we hope all of you in Southern California are safe)…

[Video]
[7.57]

Katherine St. Asaph: Maybe it’s current events that are making me hear an ominous undertone in this love song (which is silly because “Fire Excape” isn’t mythologizing LA; it’s mythologizing Brooklyn, in a way I can’t explain but is unmistakable who listened to indie-pop around 2013). Or maybe it’s the last vestiges of a pessimism I don’t use anymore. But that vibe does fill out the almost-too-spare arrangement, and makes the metallic, knifelike vocal production on Zsela’s “going down” cut more sharply.
[7]

Julian Axelrod: I can’t get enough of Zsela’s voice, which exists somewhere in the neighborhood of ANOHNI and Nilüfer Yanya but belongs to its own zip code. There’s something so powerful about a singer who always sounds like they’re about to break into a Broadway-level belt, but chooses to pull back from the brink. Whenever those synths drop in, it feels as dramatic as a final curtain call.
[8]

Leah Isobel: The soft-loud trick at the heart of “Fire Excape” is one of Zsela’s blunter tactics, and I’m not sure that it benefits from being so obvious. But it also exemplifies what I like so much about her music: it expands outward from a plain realization, articulating how it feels to know your life has permanently changed without knowing how or why or whether you will survive it. The landscape, the song-form, warps around you.
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: SCHAFER: “I guess that’s why a lot of musicians blow my mind. When I listen to a song or try to make music, which has been a disaster, the only way I can think about it is to see it. Or, I see what it would look like and then I try to figure out what that sounds like.” ZSELA: “But you paint and stuff. That comes into play when you’re thinking about music, too. Sometimes I think in colors with music, but I’m not so visual. I’m very insecure about any sort of drawing and painting. I went to an alternative school, and we did a lot of our learning through art. You had to draw your textbooks, things like that. It had to be perfect, so that was a little school trauma of mine.” The drums here are wild. Gabe Wax, was that you?
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: Zsela lacks the presence to stand out in this arrangement: she sings prettily enough but is overwhelmed by thunking bass chunks and flash-lit radiation blasts of synth. In the face of such force, she’s inessential on her own song. “When day breaks on the fire escape I’m falling in love,” is a striking moment, and notably it occurs when the music drops out and Zsela sings it a cappella.
[6]

Melody Esme: Zsela’s soulful vocals combined with a minimalist alt-pop instrumental that slowly intensifies into something casually, smoothly orchestral, this gave me a taste of early Nilüfer Yanya singles like “Baby Luv” and “Golden Cage” more than anything Yanya has released since 2018. But no Yanya record has featured something as chaotic as the little fuzz-synth sting in this song’s chorus.
[8]

Ian Mathers: Genuinely, more artpop should have blasts of noise like this, or a vocal performance this good and varied, or a moment that hits as hard as “I get along quite fine, thank you.”
[9]

1 blerg » Friday, January 17th, 2025 11:33 pm

Rounding out our readers’ picks is a choice from Joey that has Eric Clapton catching strays…

[Video]
[7.07]

Julian Axelrod: At this point, MJ Lenderman has been compared to every hyper-literate (male) songwriter and novelist under the sun. But at his best, he operates like a road-trained stand-up comic: Every town has a dive bar, every punchline has been sharpened until it draws blood, and every joke at his expense has already been made by him. Are you sick of indie guitar bros cosplaying as classic rock gods? MJ’s got a burn for the Eric Clapton stan in your life. Not into tales of Southern shitheads drowning in their own machismo? Here’s a tight five on why Vegas sucks. Worried this guy’s too irony-pilled for his own good? Enjoy this honest-to-god gorgeous shout-along chorus that would have ruled college radio if that still existed when Lenderman was born. The real kicker comes on the outro, where his ex-girlfriend/Wednesday bandmate Karly Hartzman croons the titular refrain like a drunken lullaby as our hero shreds into the void. Remember to tip your waitstaff.
[8]

Melody Esme: Yeah, I don’t get it. I didn’t really get Wednesday’s album either, but at least it had the masterpiece “Chosen to Deserve,” plus a lead singer with a mode beyond Guero-era Beck. All Lenderman has to offer is “Wristwatch”‘s “I’ve got a houseboat docked at the Himbo Dome,” one of the funniest and most compelling poetic visuals in 2024 pop music, and one that encouraged me to give Manning Fireworks more chances than I should have. And despite all the times I played it, I still had to refresh my memory on what this track even sounded like — a bad sign, considering it was the single. I like that he disses Clapton, though.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: “You’ve opened the Bible to the very first page,” says Lenderman on the album’s title track. This is meant as a dig at fundie sanctimony, but it could double as a description of Manning Fireworks as a whole, and its tendency to reach for the nearest available reference point at all times, lyrically and musically. Guitar Hero, Cars 3, the first band that pops into your head when you read the term “alt-country,” it’s all there. This reads like a defect, but it isn’t necessarily. It’s called a comfort zone for a reason, and if the artist is able to credibly embody that sense of comfort and radiate it toward the listener, then all is well. “She’s Leaving You” is a standout example of this kind of productive complacency, even if its brand of good-guy realism makes Lenderman sound like Ben Kweller’s more successful roommate, who tells everyone he meets about how therapy changed him. Solid advice, though I’m still going with Sha Sha if given a choice.
[7]

Jonathan Bradley: I suppose 30-year-old David Berman pastiche isn’t too out of date when you’re making 50-year-old Eric Clapton disses. (Please, the midlife crises of 2025 are soundtracked by Nirvana. Maybe I’m being mean because my midlife crisis could also be soundtracked by Nirvana.)
[6]

Alfred Soto: I heard nothing special in this scenester’s voice at first: one more guitar-wielding wordsmith for whom the whine is wine. The crunch compensated for the occasional howlers. But as the morning after Election Day dawned, “It falls apart/we all got work to do” sounded prophetic. Even guitar-wielding wordsmiths must have soul.
[7]

Grace Robins-Somerville: I wasn’t as crazy about this song as everyone else was when it first dropped, but it’s grown on me and it really does feel like a classic. I wanna put it on the jukebox at a shitty dive bar and I want an entire room full of alcoholic middle aged men singing along as they drink what should be their child support payments. 
[9]

Nortey Dowuona: My love of music, my hairline or my willingness to commit to self improvement? I gotta pick a metaphor, man!
[10]

Will Adams: Last year I fell into a hole of watching the show Daria from start to finish, and then rewatching certain episodes that I particularly loved over and over again. I had seen some of it growing up, when I was probably too young to understand the humor, much less its worldview. Watching it now is illuminating; I see that nearly 30 years ago, there were also kids who surveyed the landscape and shrugged at their inability to fit in. “She’s Leaving You” sounds like something that could’ve played during one of the commercial bumpers (once filled with pop songs, now featuring stock music due to licensing shenanigans): angsty while disaffected, assertive while self-effacing. The chorus’ call of “we all got work to do” doubles as a sincere motivational mantra and a fortune cookie. MJ Lenderman’s weary delivery sells it and lets the guitar solo do the talking.
[8]

Ian Mathers: I mean, it is nice to hear the slack, vaguely folky/countrified (or maybe just post-Neil Young) indie rock of my youth coming back into style even if it was never particularly my thing. I found myslf resisting the density of praise around Lenderman pretty much because I remember when this stuff was a dime a dozen, but that just means I’m on the other side of the divide than I used to be. Overhyped or not, Lenderman’s not to blame, and this is just a pretty solid song.
[8]

Iain Mew: A song this plaintive and classicist puts a lot of emphasis onto the words. The man with a rented Ferrari worshipping Eric Clapton is such a hoary stereotype it’s of age for its own midlife crisis, and as a result those lines barely feel cutting at all. The song improves from there but never loses the sense of settling for the easiest of targets.
[4]

Claire Davidson: I don’t mind deadpan breakup songs, provided the affect is used with intent, like a narrator poking fun at the self-pity they would typically indulge. Yet MJ Lenderman’s delivery here doesn’t seem self-deprecating so much as half-asleep or stoned, to the point that an otherwise endearing mix of saturated guitars simply sounds out of place in matching his sedated approach. What’s worse is that Lenderman’s lack of vitality only further draws attention to his languid lyrics, which are fine enough in capturing his subject’s dejection, but curiously withholding in describing the titular woman’s departure. The only clue to her exit is, perhaps, the subject’s propensity to idolize Eric Clapton, a reference so on-the-nose in its implied arrogance that I can’t even commend the attempt at wit.
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: MJ Lenderman’s appeal, such as it is, is in his status as a classic dumb guy bard — the absurdist ripsote to Zach Bryan’s post-ironic classic rock worship (for those keeping track, Father John Misty is the ironic take.) When he sings on “Hangover Game” that he bought fake Jordans that “weren’t even shoes” or when he says on “Wristwatch” that he’s “got a houseboat parked at the himbo dome” I do not know quite what he is talking about in a literal sense but I know what he means — a level of ridiculous, laughable debasement that we all have touched at one point in our lives or another, feeling like a cat who has managed to get stuck in a wall or atop a refrigerator. This is a fine position for an artist to occupy, but it’s also a tenuous one; you can only play the sad clown for so long. “She’s Leaving You” is where I run out of time for Lenderman’s schtick; he’s running the Neil Young with jokes playbook without the jokes, a shaggy set of riffs with a great absence at the center. 
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: Today is my birthday, so naturally I’m thinking about the new year before me. Specifically: Is this the year I enter my dad-rock era?
[8]

Aaron Bergstrom: Every song on Manning Fireworks presents a protagonist more pitiful than the last, a collection of broken men staggering through life, sneakin’ backstage to hound the girls in the circus, passed out in their Lucky Charms and searching in vain for an eternal Himbo Dome of the soul. “She’s Leaving You,” the album’s literal and figurative centerpiece, is the only song that even gestures at finding any common ground with these cautionary tales, in the process creating a kind of shambolic anthem. Sure, you might not currently be in the midst of an especially unimaginative midlife crisis. You might not be so far gone that you’re talking yourself into the genius of, yikes, Eric Clapton. And yet, wherever you are, it’s always true that it falls apart, we’ve all got work to do. Who’s feeling lucky?
[10]

no blergs » Friday, January 17th, 2025 7:00 am

And with Han Li, we blast off into the recent past…

[Video]
[6.45]

Han Li: After their wildly inventive run on NEXTGIRLZ last year, I was worried babyMINT had lost their spark. Their debut single sounded rote and well… boring. But then they released “BB Gals of the Galaxy”, a song which saw them back on their bullshit (complimentary). It leans into their weirdness, swerving from idea to idea. There are so many pieces of ear candy: the aborted intro by Siena they kept in, the infantile simplicity of the synths during the “laser gun BUI BUI” chorus, the bits where they repeat phrases like a record skipping, the cascading notes sprinkled throughout the pre-chorus. Most of all, it makes me feel the carefree innocence of being young. A time when everything felt easy and all your ideas worked. When you could screw up the intro but things still fell perfectly into place.
[8]

Iain Mew: Releasing in between the thrillingly harnessed chaos of “Booooooring” and “\ Lucy!!!!!! /”, this was comparatively underwhelming on release. Babymint’s kind-of-debut-album at the end of 2023 demonstrated a foundation of more conventional musical appeal beyond the meme and gabba stuff, though, and in context of their since-released EP “BB Gals of the Galaxy” works something like the most similar “Grab Me If U Can!!” from that album. Light, stylish pop with just enough biu-biu laser noises and vacuum synth sounds for a flavour of something beyond.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Despite never owning a Bratz doll, I am an avowed fan of the Bratz music franchise. What I like is how the albums (for whatever value of “albums”) round up session songwriters to produce more accurate and often better pastiches of McBling pop hits than the years-removed homages of Rina or Charli or Tate McRae. (Sorry, I just can’t do the mononym yet.) Honestly, they embody the sound of their year more than the real hits do. And this could be Bratz: Space Angelz, if it came out when the dominant sound was NewJeans ripoffs.
[5]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The least kitschy Babymint song I’ve heard as of yet — but even without the sheer kitchen sink charisma of “Hellokittybalahcurri” this is still a joy, full of enough quirks to support most acts for an entire album cycle. Yet what impresses me about “BB Gals of the Galaxy” is how it also works well as just straight ahead synth pop, the chant-a-long vocals balancing well with an array of arrpegios that bring to mind futuristic ice cream trucks.
[8]

Jonathan Bradley: More demure (yet certainly not more mindful) than the enthusiastically unhinged “Hellokittybalahcurry³,” “BB Gals of the Galaxy” is almost disappointing for being a well-made chiptune track. What could be more indie than leaving in the false start to your verse as a signifier of authenticity? The silliness of making space-gun noises for a chorus kicks things up a pop notch, but it’s the appended and slightly warped “do do-do do do” in the hook that catches my ear: a hummed melody that seems natural enough to appear in an idol song and so tossed off that it might stick in your head as you’re weaving your way through an asteroid belt.
[6]

Ian Mathers: Yeah, it’s a bit of a shame they seemed to have backed away from the formal inventiveness, stylistic dexterity and sheer everything of “Hellokittybalahcurri³ hellokitty????,” but one suspects that kind of pace is unsustainable and this is still a very fun song, just more straightforward. (And the video still has… lots of that stuff.)
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: “Hellokittybalahcurri” was about riding the highs of a new crush through the limitlessness of digital space, and “BB Gals” extends that ride into the outer cosmos, of which the group has a more militaristic vision than I might have expected. The laser gun mouth sounds detract from the ethereal sleekness of the post-hyperpop production, which for a group like babyMINT is probably the goal. It’s a flex, sort of: “we’re so talented that the fear of being ‘boringly perfect’ is a real concern for us, so we’ll just put the names of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in our chorus for no discernable reason.” I think they’re being used as verbs here but I’m not sure.
[7]

Melody Esme: I was willing to forgive references to Guardians of the Galaxy and The Mandalorian. I’m not much of a sci-fi fan, and I’m certainly not a Star Wars or MCU fan, but the way the words “Baby Yoda” are sung is so smooth and satisfying that it almost makes up for all the annoying memes we had to deal with five years ago. (Obviously the worst thing to happen in 2020, right?). And anyway, I love the breakbeats and the laser gun sounds and the little SOPHIE-esque touches–that little “MSMSMS” boink tube sound especially. I was gonna give it a thumbs up! But then… man, I don’t know what “Elon Musk that dude”/”Zuckerberg that dude” means. It doesn’t seem like a pro-billionaire sentiment, at the very least. Let’s see if we can pick up any context from the video. Wait… oh no, they’re forcing me to defend Zuckerberg by depicting him as a lizard person in the video, fuck! I’ll admit, I may be missing context, but even if you avoid the antisemitic/QAnon implications of “Zuckerberg that dude, lizard do do-ru,” the chorus’s lyrics still sound awful and force the image of two of the worst men alive into my brain, thereby sending me crashing back to Earth and ruining any chance of my reaching the stratosphere. And I deserve better than that. I’m not a SpaceX rocket.
[3]

Nortey Dowuona: Bread is apparently a good trading piece in negotiations with aliens. Thanks, Babymint!
[7]

Alex Clifton: Clearly we’re not meant to take this too seriously — the video indicates as much, with a “galaxy fart, fart away” and a chorus of out-of-tune recorders — but I can’t stop myself from being hung up on the line “love me up and down like I’m Baby Yoda.” Baby Yoda is not sexy! Please don’t try to make regular Yoda sexy, either! I think Babymint are trying to emphasize Baby Yoda’s cuteness, but I’m pedantic enough that this just doesn’t work for me. I think the mark of a good novelty song is that it goes down easy even when it’s being weird; you’re not meant to think too hard about what’s happening, and if there’s something jarring in there, it’s for comedic effect. By and large the song is fine, but it just misses the mark. I’m fine with laser noises but, for some reason, evoking Baby Yoda is where I draw the line.
[5]

Leah Isobel: “BB Gals of the Galaxy” toggles between naiveté and laser-focused professionalism, optimism and nihilism, love and destruction; I’d say it feels manic, but its switchbacks are precise and controlled, a constellation of every human feeling. “I’ll be your doom,” Babymint sings. To feel is to know death.
[8]

1 blerg » Thursday, January 16th, 2025 8:00 pm

Emile Simon brings us an artist whose rejected stage names include DJ Sabrina the Teenage Carpenter…

[Video]
[7.82]

Emile Simon: The opening seconds of “Anything Lost (Can Be Found Again)” announce a song of towering excesses, and its eccentric intro keeps its promises. “Anything Lost” is partly catchy dance-pop, partly busy EDM, and always zany plunderphonics. The bulk of the song is made from a Porter Robinson-esque vocal chop paired with a swift house beat, but detours abound, from acoustic drumming, breakbeat passages, and sections where Sabrina’s idiosyncratic sampling takes the spotlight. Sabrina’s contradictory impulses in terms of sampling have always been a big part of her appeal, drawing from ’90s R&B to 2000s pop all the way to YouTube vlogs, but rarely has she made it sound so expertly woven in: Ashanti and Stevie Nicks (among many others) flash up for brief seconds, before the song makes other left turns. “Anything Lost” is also an exercise in tension building: the different sections keep upping the stakes until — in typical Sabrina fashion — the song reaches its climax in its last third by introducing a pair of frenetic vocal samples that serve as the song’s definite hooks. They would be strong enough to stand on its own for the rest of the tracks, but Sabrina adds an extra batch of synths and vocals, resulting in a psychedelic triumph. It sounds like abandonment — dive deep enough in the music, and everything will be alright.
[10]

Melody Esme: Okay, it turns out the wrong way to get into her music is “trying to find time for all three-plus hours of recordings she released in 2024 right in the middle of EOY season until you’re so stressed you turn it off,” and the correct way is “listening to one eight-minute track, singled out for you, and zoning out until you forget what you’re listening to but dig it a lot and think it sounds a bit like Discovery-era Daft Punk.” If I’m lucky, I’ll make it through her back catalog by the summer, at which point she’ll drop a five-hour album and I’ll have to catch up again. I will listen to that album, though. If you have a name like DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, I’ll follow you into any abyss. Especially if our descent is scored by dance music this uplifting.
[9]

Iain Mew: The best evocation of the sound of standing outside a party since Mondo Grosso’s “Labyrinth,” except in this case it’s more like standing in a courtyard between several different parties, blissing out as the drifting winds change the mix to and fro.
[7]

Will Adams: Pretty, euphoric, fills the same slot in my brain that old Fred Falke productions do. But as the song stretched past the five minute mark, the luster faded. Is there a 7″ edit out there, or will I have to make one myself?
[6]

Leah Isobel: Sledgehammer-subtle, drenched in three too many layers of irony, and way too long. I like it!
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Pop as background music. I promise that’s a compliment.
[7]

Julian Axelrod: I have a vivid memory of playing this Miguel x Cashmere Cat remix in the car with my dad, who has wide-ranging but incredibly particular musical tastes. To my surprise, he loved it. “It’s like candy,” he said with a smile. “Candy can be bad, but when it’s good it’s really good.” I wonder if my dad would fuck with DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, who approaches dance music with the maximalist mentality of a kid in a candy store. Why settle for one drop when you can have ten? Who says a pop song can’t last twelve minutes? If you’re constantly reaching new euphoric peaks, do you ever have to come down? “Anything Lost (Can Be Found Again)” is as thrilling as any song from Sabrina’s 2024 opus Hex, but analyzing her music in a traditional single context is like reviewing only the green M&Ms from a party-size bag. Whether you’re in it for eight minutes or 90, it’s hard not to get lost in the sugar rush of synths, samples, and spoken-word interludes. This is some really fucking good candy.
[9]

Ian Mathers: This sounds great the whole time it’s on and even at a mere eight minutes and change is strangely exhausting in its formless maximalism. It feels like it’s always peaking but never going anywhere; if this came on in the club I would enjoy myself but if they put on a whole album or even a few more tracks I would be so tired, physically and emotionally. I could say this about everything I’ve heard from DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ, which means I respect the work but I’m not likely to seek it out myself.
[7]

Claire Davidson: I remember listening to Makin’ Magick a few years ago, and the emotion it inspired most in me was frustration. Yes, DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ can frequently blend together a sweet melody with a catchy vocal line, for example, but her strategy of endlessly saturating the listener with bursts of concentrated euphoria, often without a real anchor grounding her compositional sprawl, paradoxically read to me as more false than not. I’m sure she’s evolved greatly over the seven years (!) since that release, but “Anything Lost (Can Be Found Again)” has many of the same problems I initially found in her work. I do appreciate the image of golden-hour music festivals the song conjures, thanks to its wistful vocal samples, bright, spacious synths, and thumping beat that feels pulled from a decade-old EDM track. That being said, the downside of constructing a song around a kaleidoscope of fragments, all of which seem to form a background for a centerpiece that never arrives, is that there are no real dynamic shifts to make the song’s richest moments truly rewarding. Combined with the stream of platitudes that comprise the song’s few intelligible lyrics, the experience feels, at best, like the synthetic imitation of a better product—its pleasures tangible but fleeting, and all transparently engineered.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: The greatest version of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” is not the one that appeared in Titanic or the edit that featured on Let’s Talk About Love; it’s the “Dialogue Mix,” which ramps up the emotional valence by ramming out-of-context Leo-and-Kate line readings into its swell. (“Go on, I’ll get the next one!”/”No! Not without you!”) It’s a smash-cut to the feeling; three hours of film concentrated and distilled into a few freighted words freed from the bounds of plot or character. DJ Sabrina the Teenage DJ uses dialogue the same way: as great vessels of meaning that gain power by being unmoored from the identifying source details that fix them in space and time. “Anything lost can be found again,” reassures a voice — no particular voice, but a determined one — which loops and repeats itself over the burbles and stutters of cheap post-Mylo filter house. If hauntology found the uncanny in lost artefacts of the past and chillwave discovered comfort, Sabrina finds connection. The future-that-never-was might not have been lost. Maybe it’s waiting to be found.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: Me two minutes in: a classic. masterpiece. the best thing happening in music. Me four minutes in: this is kinda going a bit long, is the song almost done? Me six minutes in: this sounds amazing, how do they do this!??! Me seven minutes in: well done DJ’s Sabrina and Salem, you two are excellent DJs. Me eight minutes in: THEF-ITSOVERWHYPUTITBACKON Me 0:00 seconds in: a classic. masterpiece. the best thing happening in music.
[10]

1 blerg » Thursday, January 16th, 2025 4:00 pm

Nikki takes us to work…

[Video]
[6.93]

Julian Axelrod: What made Wallsocket so thrilling was the way Underscores mastermind April Grey filtered vignettes about shady characters in a small town through warped versions of the pop songs playing over the PA of the local convenience store. Every hook was immediately engaging, but each one hit harder when you realized it was alluding to a guy from three songs earlier. Listening to “My Guy (Corporate Shuffle)” out of context is like watching a deleted scene months after the movie’s already left the theater. (Fittingly, the song appears on Wallsocket (Director’s Cut); you can tell a lot about an artist by how they label their deluxe albums.) On its own, the song is a sinister shuffle that churns like a pit in your stomach. But whenever it references another Underscores song like “Cops and Robbers,” it felt like grasping at the memory of a half-remembered banger from another lifetime. Then again, I’m not going to dock points for being overly ambitious. After all, Wallsocket is an album about hustling your way toward something bigger and better, even if you’ll never quite reach it.
[7]

Grace Robins-Somerville: My favorite of the Wallsocket bonus tracks. The opening verse gets stuck in my head all the time. 
[8]

Claire Davidson: The basics of the Underscores formula are sharp, even on deluxe tracks: April Harper Grey’s sarcastic sing-song lilt is wonderfully venomous, as are the insults that open the first verse. Still, the Underscores project is so ripe for subversion that I can’t help but be disappointed when things don’t go off the rails — between the act’s static-soaked sound and lyrical penchant for flirting with danger, “My Guy” promises more edge than its halfhearted earworm hook can deliver.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Finely tuned garishness — you can see all the machinery working in real time to make this as obnoxious as possible, which should sap away the charm, but every additional layer of schtick (the vocal processing! the triple perspective! the glam rock of it all!) ends up pushing this into greatness. Genuinely an effective tourism ad for the Midwest!
[8]

Will Adams: Tips a bit too much toward the former half of the Obnoxious Banger equilibrium.
[5]

Leah Isobel: Great momentum, deeply annoying.
[4]

Katherine St. Asaph: You cannot do The Beat — “Rock and Roll Pt. 2,” “Personal Jesus,” “Disposable Teens,” etc. — in such a halfhearted, larkish way. I mean, you can, and it’ll retain some of its second/third/fourth-hand power, but ultimately it won’t work. Rachel Stevens sounded more menacing than this!
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: Schaffel pop, welcome back! It’s been a while! Underscores understands how this sound should be ostentatious and obnoxious in equal measure, and she has delivers these bon mots with devastating flair. I particular enjoy the filtered ad-libs appended to the end of each line like it’s a Jeezy verse (“What’s wrong with you?”). But something this showy should not be this vague; if the mots don’t actually amount to much, you start wondering whether they’re all that bon. What does it mean to push someone over in bed? What’s this about a robbery? Are dermatologists local? Is there enough glitz for me not to believe the answers to these questions don’t matter?
[6]

Taylor Alatorre: It’s a Class of ’09 update to Marilyn Manson’s suburban demonology, where the targets are more at once more specific (Manson never snarled about PTA meetings) and more scattershot. (Who am I meant to be angry at and why?) Underscores does a good job of making the scratches and screeches sound like an extension of her character’s deranged voice, but the self-limiting sameness of the mechanical animal stomp makes the instrumental break seem less like a wild rupture than a practical accessory. Blustery overcompensation isn’t the worst possible look here, though — she’s still singing about the upper-middle class, presumably.
[6]

Iain Mew: At most I understand about half of what is going on in the narrative this song, but the humour and punch of the needling and taunting is enough to make it work anyway. That and the energy of its constant churning crunch, the way that all of the instrumentals get sliced as they arrived. It’s the kind of song that can pull off knocking out several words with digital effects and the response vocals singing “what is wrong with you??” and it doesn’t even stand out that far. “Don’t get too comfortable” indeed.  
[8]

Alex Clifton: Billie Eilish mixed with Halsey’s girl-group impression plus a bunch of detailed lore I have zero context for, and yet this scratches an itch in my brain I didn’t know I had. Not that this is intended necessarily as a fully commentary of the state of the world these days, but it feels pretty emblematic: dark and grody, poking fun at a suburban existence, yet also with a brightness that hooks me along. I don’t know what’s happening but I’m happily along for the ride.
[7]

Ian Mathers: Sounds a bit at times like a speedier cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Capital G” interpolating bits of the Mary Wells “My Guy” and if you don’t think that sounds sick as hell I don’t know what to tell you. I tapped out on figuring out what’s going on in the lyrics when I hit the word “ARG,” but in any case it’s a lot of stompy fun to listen to.
[8]

Melody Esme: Look, I’m not certain that my experience of watching the “Infinity Guitars” video back in the early 2010s and thinking, “Damn, I wish I was as cool and hot as Alexis Krauss” is universal among Zillennial trans women. I’m just saying, it would explain why we keep making music like this.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: CJ THE X VOICE: MOMMY
[10]

1 blerg » Thursday, January 16th, 2025 11:47 am

Ian Lefkowitz takes us back 12 years in Jukebox time…

[Video]
[5.50]

Ian Lefkowitz: Former Jukebox favorite Florrie released her debut album this year, which sounds lovely until you realize that the “former” dates back all the way to 2011. The last decade of her career has seen a lot of false starts and heartbreaks, and it’s easy to rue the missed potential, but her pop radar remains strong all these years later. Florrie’s newer songs layer her Xenomania roots with depth and wisdom, but “Looking for Love” comes from her initial set of incandescent bangers, dating back to 2012 or so. As has always been true with Florrie, her sense of rhythm and brightness let her songs gallop along the dance floor. Listening now, it almost feels like a portal to the world of Annie and Katy B and Little Boots, when dance pop hadn’t yet been fully subsumed by the Antonoff sound. And if Sophie Ellis-Bextor can do it, maybe Florrie can have a second act yet.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: In 2010, Florrie was preparing the debut album that would be scrapped after Sony dropped her, leaving her to make EPs until she finally completed her new album, The Lost Ones. “Looking For Love” was a song on her scrapped record that, due to being reworked, was added to The Lost Ones last minute. The hook is damn near identical to the original because it was taken directly from the original. Brian Higgins, her former boss and head of longtime pop songwriting team Xenomania, handles the keyboards and programming, but the drums — simple, well mannered pop-rock loops with little bright flourishers buried under the bass, keys and synths — are played by Florrie herself, to great effect. The only problem is Florrie’s voice, which is bright and clean but bland, carrying the tune as written but unable to enliven it.
[5]

Katherine St. Asaph: Thank goodness JADE made the definitive Xenomania song of the decade, because the actual Xenomania are sounding like Ali Tamposi if she gave up on life. The track is over a decade old, so what they were trying to sound like was probably “We Found Love” — if Calvin Harris had given up on life.
[2]

Isabel Cole: Every time this song begins it triggers the irrational subconscious conviction that it is an Ellie Goulding song I vaguely remember hearing on the radio years ago, but happily the illusion dissipates once the beat kicks in. The verses, low and wistful, are lovely, and the pre-chorus builds the energy appealingly; unfortunately the chorus doesn’t feel as massive as it ought to, even though I certainly can’t quibble with any details of production. The melody sounds like it’s aiming to soar but feels too leaden to fly. Its simplicity works against it, I think, and the easy warmth in Florrie’s voice that worked so well earlier can’t carry the song through those big, long notes.
[6]

Iain Mew: The melody makes it sound a bit like One Direction’s “One Thing,” with its lairy buoyancy replaced with electronic throb. That combination gives enough momentum to carry the song, but the gleaming sound dominates to the extent that the lyrics come off as weirdly static for their dramatic subject matter.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The melody soars, the production passes for a Body Talk b-side, but everything feels a bit like electropop Lenny Kravitz. The intentions are good, and the popcraft appreciation is there, but the execution is strangely amateurish. A bridge that rhymes “heart” with “battle scars” with an invocation that it “never rains, it pours” is unforgivable.
[4]

Melody Esme: A very good pre-chorus that, like too many very good pre-choruses, has nowhere to go, leading to an insipid nothing of a refrain that’s unable to sustain the song. (Guess what words the title is followed by? Don’t think about it too hard, she didn’t.)
[4]

Jonathan Bradley: “I Took a Little Something” was so singular in its strange lost precision that Florrie’s truncated career became self-justifying: of course a lost gem like that would be a one-of-one. The worst thing about “Looking for Love” is that it sounds too much like it should be a follow-up to that earlier song, and like many sequels, it repeats the broadest strokes but loses the texture, the oddity. The point of “Something” wasn’t that it was a sad bop; it was that it was lost and druggy while containing the anxious possibility that its lostness might endure beyond its drugginess. It’s unfair to ask why this entirely capable, synth-rain frowny-face dance song isn’t as good as one recorded 14 years ago (the hook is about “looking for love in the wrong places”; it’s a frowny-face dance song par excellence), but I also can’t hear Florrie as anything but do-call-it-a-comeback. 
[6]

Leah Isobel: Unfortunately, this nostalgia play worked on me.
[6]

Ian Mathers: The first time we covered Florrie here was over 13 years ago, and I gave “I Took a Little Something” a [10]. I still would, but I’d talk about it very differently now. (Both its jankiness and how much I love its jankiness have become more apparent to me, for one.) I’d like to thank Ian for picking this song over the 2024 version of “I Took a Little Something” on The Lost Ones, because now I don’t have to try to figure out whether I think it’s actually worse or whether I’m just reacting to the fact that it’s changed. “Looking for Love” is probably more representative of how I reacted to the album as a whole, anyway, and it’s good! It still feels like it has a bit more of a dance music pulse than a lot of otherwise similar pop, but in a more polished, put together form than 2011. Lots of people trying to make music get their plans and their dreams derailed; not many are able to stick with it (materially as much as emotionally) until they finally do. It’s hard not to be happy for her.
[8]

no blergs » Wednesday, January 15th, 2025 1:52 am

Next up, Darj introduces us to Manila’s girl group ambassadors…

[Video]
[6.70]

Jonathan Bradley: This dropped a month before “Espresso,” for those tracking 2024’s disco-froth timeline; if this sounds like a caffeinated take on Sabrina Carpenter, that’s purely down to the confidence and the zeitgeist. But “Salamin, Salamin” sounds like throwback idol-pop to me, and a mondegreen points me in the right direction. “Kailan niya ba ‘ko papansinin?” the Bini girls ask in the hook, but my anglophone ear caught “…Bubble Pop,” and I hear in this Filipina group some of the ebullient camaraderie and easy interplay of the K-pop of a decade-plus ago. There are contemporary touches too, though: I like the dexterous rapping, untouched by the self-consciousness of drilled professionalism. “Trapped in this fairytale, but I don’t want to wake up in this dream,” is a great glitter sprinkle of a bridge that leads into a tongue twister chorus. This is a girlish song about a crush, but it doesn’t shrink that feeling into diary entries and whispers. The line I heard as a HyunA allusion actually means “when will he notice me?” As soon as he opens his ears, I expect.
[8]

Melody Esme: “Forget Me Nots” slap bass combined with sweet bubblegum hooks and a fantasy/fairytale(/Satanic????) love lyric reminiscent of Little Mix’s “Black Magic.” This may be the first P-pop song I’ve ever heard, and it makes me want to explore more.
[7]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Can’t form a coherent thought about this — overwhelmed by the brightness of the bass tone.
[4]

Taylor Alatorre: Foregrounding the bass guitar in the mix is such a simple decision to make, but it earns the group some major goodwill by demonstrating that even the cutesiest of bubblegum disco-pop doesn’t have to skimp on the genre’s ancestral foundations. It also makes it easier to execute the girl group two-step of casting feminine passivity as a latent superpower – “I’m ready to be called your princess” is some seriously assertive passive voice.
[8]

Nortey Dowuona: John Michael Conchada, the writer and vocal arranger of this sweet little bop. Range: what would music be like without it? Don’t sleep on fellow arranger Paula Rose Alcasid either.
[8]

Alfred Soto: The opening synth tinkles and the slap bass evoke Carly Rae Jepsen if she had existed during the sophisti-pop circa 1987. The rest of the track follows suit.
[7]

Katherine St. Asaph: Relentless okayness.
[3]

Alex Clifton: As I’m in my 30s, I’m not the target audience for this, but I’ll always have a soft spot for bubblegum pop. There’s no reason to reinvent the wheel with a “sigh, my crush is so dreamy” song, and BINI do a nice job creating something sweet and inoffensive, yet distinctive enough to stand out from a crowd. Adding a bonus point because I love the Y2K/Lisa Frank aesthetics in the music video. Does that count as pandering? Probably, but as a millennial, I’m not used to being pandered to by younger generations, so I’ll take it.
[6]

Ian Mathers: Genuinely can’t remember the last time I heard a bassline like that — in terms of sound, in terms of what it’s playing, in terms of how essential it is to the joie de vivre — in a song like this. It works so well it makes me faintly sad it feels like such an outlier. 
[8]

Leah Isobel: The post-NewJeans girl group norm is soft austerity: twinkly, plush exteriors belying songs that with foundations of cold metal and grey concrete. Hooks are blunt and weaponized, rhythm tracks are skittering and harsh. All extraneous elements are bled out to better deliver a pop-mechanical rush. By comparison, “Salamin, Salamin,” with its thick layer of bubblegum frosting and seemingly endless length and honest-to-god double chorus, feels positively decadent. It doesn’t beg for attention but rather assumes that the audience wants to care, that its fantasy is actually aspirational. How nice!
[8]

no blergs » Wednesday, January 15th, 2025 12:43 am

Don’t worry, readers — we didn’t forget about you! This week we’ll be covering a couple of your favorite tracks from 2024, plus one more new(ish) song! First up, Claire Davidson with the Caroline redux…

[Video]
[7.67]

Claire Davidson: I can’t decide whether the at-times-bizarre lyrics of “Starburned and Unkissed” are an intentional reflection of the uncanniness that characterizes I Saw the TV Glow, the film for which it was written, or just the result of Caroline Polachek’s florid poetry having gone without a necessary edit. For all of her odd imagery, though, Polachek sure knows how to write a hook, and her desperate cries cut through the song’s bursts of guitar with enough emotion to make her words resonate on an intuitive level, if not a literal one. Even that eccentricity produces one devastating refrain: Polachek’s comparison of her heart to a phantom limb captures the pain of searching for intimacy with such aplomb that it justifies the entire song’s existence. It’s a shame, then, that the final chorus ends so abruptly, before its sense of tragedy can settle with the listener.
[7]

Melody Esme: I Saw the TV Glow is a film about transcendence–how terrifying it is, but also how essential it is if you don’t want to spend your life in the state of a constant panic attack. Panic attacks sent me down the path of discovery that led to my realizing I was a trans woman, so the film, and the final scene especially, resonated on a deep level. “Starburned and Unkissed,” in turn, sounds transcendent. But that’s almost too dramatic for what the song truly feels like: relief. It evokes the feeling of weight falling off your shoulders, of remembering to take deep breaths and drink enough water — the sensation of estrogen entering a body that didn’t even know how badly it needed it and the realization that the fog you’ve existed in doesn’t need to be there forever. You can find peace of mind and be the person you were meant to be. And it’s not an intense journey to somewhere new — it’s home, where you belong. Stepping inside for the first time doesn’t feel strange or alien because you’ve always known on some level that it was there, waiting for you. “Come home,” Polachek beckons, as A. G. Cook’s synths entangle you in their web of love and protection. And once you’re there, they let you know you can stay forever if you want to.
[10]

Grace Robins-Somerville: The first couple times I listened to this song, I thought there was a different vocalist on the second verse and harmonizing on the chorus. Perhaps that just speaks to the elasticity of Caroline Polachek’s voice. It might’ve been kinda cool to get somebody else on it for a duet — I’m imagining someone like Ethel Cain or Samia or Weyes Blood. Still, this and “Claw Machine” are probably my favorites on the ISTTG soundtrack, which is saying a lot because I adore that soundtrack and could see it becoming super foundational to some kid’s music taste, in the way that the soundtracks from movies like Juno and Adventureland were to mine when I was in middle school. Also, if Caroline Polachek writes a song where the title includes a compound word that she made up, odds are I’ll be into it. 
[9]

Julian Axelrod: Respectfully, Jane Schoenbrun should have given I Saw the TV Glow‘s mid-movie performance slot to Caroline Polachek instead of Phoebe Bridgers and Sloppy Jane. My girl CP has a better look, more screen presence, and a better soundtrack song. (Also, it’s worth noting that my theatre’s audience had a bigger reaction to Conner O’Malley than Phoebe Bridgers. Who has more face recognition: Caroline, Phoebe or Conner? Sound off in the comments!) “Claw Machine” literally opens with the line “I saw the TV glow,” but “Starburned and Unkissed” feels truer to the movie’s vibe: visceral yet ethereal, hopeful yet tormented, starburned yet unkissed.
[8]

Alfred Soto: Emilia Perez used crap songs for color and did nothing to illuminate how a person transitions; I Saw the TV Glow used non-diegetic quasi-pop songs as accompaniment — as a glow, if you like. The chorus lands as flat as the power chords, but at least Caroline Polachek recorded music that the film’s protagonists might’ve dug.
[6]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: The flange-y power chords on the chorus hint at the potential of Polachek’s impending jock jam era, but everything else is a bit undercooked; perhaps it’s the off-album-cycle timing, but we’ve covered her twice in the past month-or-so on threadbare material. She’s one of our moment’s most skillful vocalists, but she’s playing with her food here. Paired against A.G. Cook in classic rock mode (his least successful guise), she relaxes into a virtuoso’s slouch — gorgeous but never moving, lacking the more playful touches of her work with Chairlift, as Ramona Lisa, or on Pang. 
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: Caroline Polachek leaving the artpop of Pang and Desire, I Want to Turn Into You behind to make the soft-rockier “Starburned and Unkissed” reminds me of Nina Gordon leaving Veruca Salt and making the substantially soft-rockier Tonight and the Rest of My Life. The analogy is imperfect in several ways. Gordon’s move toward pop-rock meant she rocked less, but Polachek’s move toward pop-rock makes her rock more — maybe more than ever. Polachek’s songwriting is far more oblique than Gordon’s, and remains so here. And Gordon’s album, as her solo debut, established her as a new artist with a new sound; Polachek went solo years ago, and this soundtrack single might just be a side stint and not a permanent reinvention. But my reaction to both pivots is exactly the same: pleasant, but less interesting.
[6]

Leah Isobel: In general, I find Caroline’s solo work a mostly insufferable, juvenile, and shallow platform for image-building. She has no musical curiosity and nothing to say in her music that can only be said in her music. This shallowness explains why she works as a pop artist — pop music is shallow — but where great pop inhabits shallowness so thoroughly that it transmutes into divine presence, Caroline can only approach pop from the oblique, distant angle of a 2000s blog darling. “Look at me,” her music says, “I’m making silly pop songs. But I am an artist! Isn’t that crazy?” In her understanding of pop, songs are deprioritized, as if all you need to become a pop singer are the right reference points. This makes her full-length albums kitschy and cloying, her promotional campaigns corny and exhausting. And yet, hater as I am, I actually find “Starburned and Unkissed”… kinda bearable? 
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: I like songs about male loneliness — female loneliness, too. I recoil from tweets and longform articles about “loneliness epidemics” of any gender, whether from a feminist or fascist or Third Way centrist lens. This isn’t because the problems don’t exist, but because the opiners tend to flatten lives and circumstances into brusque bullet points, as if the right narrative shift or policy toolkit would reduce nights spent staring up at ceiling fans by 58%. “Starburned and Unkissed,” despite its purported grunge pedigree, is fully invested in feeling out the messy contours of modern loneliness, in ways both that are both sympathetic and alluringly opaque. “Digital sand” is the crude scene-setter, but “come home, the kettle’s whistling” is the establishing moment, panning out to reveal the abyssal gap between aimless meme-sharing sessions and a seemingly unattainable domestic fantasy. Polachek’s teenage narrator is unsure if they even want that fantasy, but it’s these headlong leaps between barely formed desires that are captured so well in this queasy coming-of-age portrait. The guitar overdrive of ’90s alternative is compressed into a “deep-fried” artifact — not a new technique, but one which aptly illustrates the concept of emotional distortion, of not knowing whether one’s feelings aren’t just copied from some script they overheard once. “Hey, you Casanova” is also this sort of trial-and-error posturing, but it’s only a brief respite from the high school social death outlined in the title, such a source of shame that the thought is left uncompleted at the song’s end.
[9]

Ian Mathers: I have listened to “Starburned and Unkissed” plenty of times separate from I Saw the TV Glow, and I just love it as a song all on its own. As an actual ’90s kid, there’s a moment or two here where the production yanked me back to my teen years, but that’s not sufficient to explain my love for it. (As for “grunge,” the connection is mainly in its commitment to the classically unsubtle quiet/loud/quiet structure, where you know exactly where it’s going to hit, just accomplished here via different tools.) Still, it is true that every time I listen to this I think back to one of the most emotionally overwhelming movie theatre experiences I’ve had in the past decade, so feel free to assign 10% or even 20% of the score here to the music supervisor et al.
[10]

Jonathan Bradley: Claire Danes gazing through a fishtank. This radiates.
[9]

Nortey Dowuona: Don’t lie awake in your grave, please. Climb out. This world still needs you.
[7]

1 blerg » Tuesday, January 14th, 2025 9:56 pm

And finally, Wayne closes out 2024 in the only way possible. Stay tuned for our readers’ picks, and thanks so much for hanging with us this year. Your presence is dear to our heart. (Fart)

[Video]
[4.38]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Collateral damage in the Nicki v. Megan wars, this was always going to be somewhat too-on-the-nose and unfunny, but in the aftermath it’s been completely forgotten. 
[5]

Aaron Bergstrom: The funniest parenthetical of the year and surprisingly little else to recommend it. 
[3]

Tim de Reuse: I’d only heard excerpts of this before — the bits and pieces that went TikTok viral. The whole is, somehow, strictly less than its parts.
[0]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: My tolerance for Ice Spice is a lot higher than I thought it was. This reduces her down to the dumbest possible iteration of her appeal — a half-baked scat joke — and it still charms me to an extent I am not entirely comfortable expressing. If it were any more complicated I’d hate it, but here, at minimum viable Ice Spice, I reach a certain nirvana.
[6]

Jackie Powell: Ice Spice’s most successful songs and features have all included a catchy riff, beat or sample that crosses into the most prominent pop cultural touch points. I think about the opening high-pitched “grrah”s that recur on her hit “Deli,” which became popular on TikTok. I think about the iconic sample from Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” that she and Nicki Minaj used to help fuel their song “Barbie World,” which was played over the credits of Barbie last year. The bass riff and beats that sound like crickets on “Princess Diana” stuck in my head while reporting on WNBA games this summer. But there is nothing of that caliber on “Think U the Shit (Fart).” The concept of this song is amusing, as it’s essentially a Latto diss track, and I appreciate Ice Spice’s wit in creating a song based on one of the internet’s most recognized memes. But musically, it’s inferior to her previous offerings. The synth horn that opens the song is a motif that slows Spice’s flow. At her best, she glides with pace alongside the rhythm of the music accompanying her, but this track lags, coming across as tired rather than wired. 
[4]

Nortey Dowuona: The synths are weak and flimsily put together, but RIOTUSA, Synthetic and Venny do a good job on the bouncy, yet clumsy drum programming. As for Ice Spice, the stylin is better with the opener. 
[4]

Leah Isobel: Where Ice Spice songs were once coolly ebullient, “Think U the Shit (Fart)” comes across as workmanlike, more concerned with maintaining the Ice Spice persona than in expanding that persona in meaningful ways. It’s not the worst sin, but it doesn’t quite justify itself, either.
[5]

Taylor Alatorre: My self-induced auditory hallucination of Casey Kasem pronouncing the name of this song, including the word “parentheses,” on American Top 40 > the actual song
[3]

Jonathan Bradley: As a gag title, it belongs in the pantheon alongside “Goop on Ya Grinch.” Absurdly, Ice Spice almost succeeds at turning the joke into a song: as poop lyrics go, it’s certainly among her cleverest, even if that superlative deserves a great big “in the land of the blind…” caveat. I could maintain some dignity and point to the irritable little squiggle that forms this beat’s hook, or the coyly dexterous way Ice Spice bolts her flow to a four-four club rhythm that nearly transforms into a house beat once the handclaps come in. Or I could underline the way she takes the title’s impudence and folds it into the brazen, bratty condescension of a succession of rhymes that matches a sneered “mammy,” with “can’t stand me,” “panties,” and “hard-knock life; no Annie.” (She then extends her interests to cartoons: Dragon Ball and Snow White co-exist in in one couplet.) But I can’t front. The point of “Think U the Shit (Fart)” is that it features a parenthetical fart. That’s funny.
[7]

Will Adams: The joke is funny, and no amount of stans outraged that Pitchfork would deign to give Y2K a positive score could convince me otherwise. But that’s all there is to this song, in which Ice Spice delivers serviceable lines with negligible energy. Remember how steely and focused she sounded on “Princess Diana”? (Damn.)
[4]

Dave Moore: Here I sit, broken-hearted. 
[3]

Ian Mathers: It’s truly all downhill from “you not even the fart,” which genuinely made me laugh.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: Your negative blurbs are, all together, scarcely worth a FART-HING.
[7]

3 blergs » Tuesday, December 24th, 2024 12:14 am